An analysis of clause usage in academic texts produced by African American, Haitian, and Hispanic community college students

A major challenge for the increasing multicultural and multilingual community college student population has been the difficulty in accessing the register features which define academic writing.. In this study, an analysis of clause structures using writing samples collected from 45 community-college students, 15 from African-American, Haitian and Hispanic students respectively, showed the degree to which the students relied on their speech by using hypotactic and paratactic clauses instead of the main and embedded clauses characteristic of the written academic register. The study has expanded on previous research which had focused on native versus nonnative English speakers (ESL) in English-language programs, by including African American students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and therefore speak English as a second dialect (ESD), and Generation 1.5 students (Haitian and Hispanic), who have command of conversational English, come to the U.S. as first or second generation immigrants, and have graduated from U.S. high schools. Both ESD and Generation 1.5 students often grapple with the features of academic writing. ESD students may be challenged since their dialect occurs predominantly in spoken discourse, so students may go to school without any exposure to written discourse in their home language, but Generation 1.5 students may speak native languages, which have standardized orthographies and therefore have been exposed to register features of written discourse in Haitian Creole (or French) and Spanish.